Staying with trouble

Abstract

The idea that we might 'stay with trouble' is indebted to the intellectual corpus of Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California -Santa Cruz. In her many publications and public lectures, Haraway has made the point that terms such as the Anthropocene are both 'too big and too small' (Haraway, 2016, pp. 100-101). One of her interventions was to propose a set of neologisms that captured better what was stake; namely, how to appreciate better a sense of natural limits, a recognition of the mutual entanglement between the human and the natural, and an acknowledgement that we need to 'make kin with the non-human world' (Paulson, 2019) in these challenging times (what Haraway terms the Chutulucene). When thinking about the genesis of the Anthropocene, a term used to signify the distinctly human impact on the Earth's physical systems (notably its climate), Haraway speaks inter alia about Plantationocene and Capitalocene (Haraway, 2015). Both terms are rooted in a desire to make explicit the proposition that the Anthropocene has human and physical geographies and temporalities. Ecological regimes are part and parcel of colonialism and capitalism, and the plantation acts as an enduring analytic to consider how human communities cultivate, organize and consume resources including food and water. In so doing, it also reveals the costs of those logics of ecological and political governance ecologies are engineered, human and non-human populations are disruptedwhile hierarchies of violence and domination inform both. However, as the work of Haraway and others such as Anna Tsing emphasizes, there are always opportunities for knowledge systems and ways of living to endure and even thrive (Tsing, 2017). Simon Dalby's timely essay about bordering sustainability in the Anthropocene reminds us that the interlocking issues of territory, politics and governance are integral (Dalby, 2019, in this issue). For several hundred years, the international community of states has worked on the premise that one could border and order the natural realm on the assumption that it was comparatively stable and conducive to do so. In Dalby's reading of the contemporary condition (and likely future trajectories), the proposition that the ecological world is informed by comparative stationarity is not fit for purpose. As journalists such as David Wallace-Wells remind their audiences, parts of the earth will become inhospitable and uninhabitable in the 21st century (Wallace-Wells, 2019). Emerging thermal regimes of heat will expose further inequalities in terms of where life is possible, let alone bearable. Human and other forms of living migration will inevitably follow. Borders will be made and remade, and perhaps part of the turn towards populism, nativism and virulent forms of nationalisms is informed by a visceral sense that the world's natural and human worlds are being scrambled (Dodds, 2020).As our worlds continue to change, eco...